Old 12-20-17, 10:07 AM
  #4688  
queerpunk
aka mattio
 
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That's pretty common when roadies transition to track racing. My coach rolls his eyes at training power ("yeah, anyone can do XXX watts at 60rpm - the hard part is doing it at 120 rpm"), and closer to the season, we do a lot of work to make sure that I'm putting down power at speed. We call it "activation."

You have a few other options. You can use big gears - that's what a lot of people do. The drawback to big gears is that while they tend to be good for qualifying, they can be pretty rough in sprint rounds.

But really you just need to train power application at those cadences. There are a few components of this. You need to be generally comfortable at higher cadences, and this comes from prolonged intervals at higher cadences than you'd ever do on the road. Then, you need to have the neuromuscular ability to apply lower torque faster faster - and that means overcadence spinups. The final piece of the puzzle is pulling those together into actual power application at the cadences. A lot of sprint work is focused just on hitting cadence targets; once the max creeps up, it's time to gear up. That's when you're truly applying power at race-appropriate cadences.

This is the time when I point out that if your coach doesn't understand the specific demands of track racing then you might not be getting what you need given your goals. I've seen road coaches try to train track athletes and grope blindly in the dark because there is stuff that they just don't get.
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